Click, click, and the virtual artwork on the computer screen disappears into an electronic shopping basket, the buyer's credit card number receives a hit and in a distant warehouse a dispatch worker reads an onscreen reference number and reaches into a rack for the real artwork.
It's not a painting or pottery. It's a contemporary artist's print, rolled up in a cardboard tube. No need for X-ray eyes to know what kind of image is inside. The print will be graphic, tending towards abstract, colourful, bold, decorative - and undemanding. This is click art, a new genre and a new bog-standard in taste dictated by information technology.
It is a thriving remnant of repeated attempts to sell fine art and antiques through their virtual images on the internet instead of the old-fashioned business of allowing buyers to see, touch - even smell - the real thing before buying.
Hundreds of venture capitalists who rushed to back art and antiques sites on the net two years ago are now counting their losses. They predicted that punters intimidated by art galleries would have no inhibitions about click-buying instead.
But they underestimated their need to examine real art before buying it. One of the first big sites to learn the lesson was artnet.com, which announced earlier this year that it would no longer sell paintings. It laid off staff and is now focusing on prints and photographs.
Such batch-produced art carries fewer risks of authenticity and condition than originals such as paintings, especially if the edition is fresh. What you see on your screen is what you get. And it's comparatively cheap, more so if the editions are big, up to 500, and the artists are not well known. Hence graphic prints that are bold enough to make an impact even as thumbnail illustrations on the screen, will arrive on the doorstep in perfect condition.
As art, they have the same eye-catching appeal as film posters, record sleeves and advertising graphics. Investment value? Forget it, at least for the time being. But bear in mind that film poster art is now on a roll; film posters by graphic artists such as the American Saul Bass, who produced the memorable, minimalist, high-impact posters for films such as Anatomy of a Murder and Bonjour Tristesse , sell at auction for three- and four-figure sums, even though the originals were mass-produced throwaways.
Now a new generation of young, computer-literate graphic artists has homed in on click art. The net has provided them with a means of commercially distributing their work that graphic artists of Bass's generation would have envied. Never mind the blandness of most click-art prints: be receptive to the few stunning images that stick in the brain like tunes that will not go away.
For example, click into the provocatively titled thisisrealart.com for Kim Hiorthøy's screenprint 'A culture all about watching and appearing 1', in an edition of 100 at £175 each, excluding VAT. It is a big red italic letter 'o', with yellow and purple shading, the sort of clear, bold shape that makes Terry Frost's abstract paintings so stunning, but in a style that is all its own.
It exploits the current vogue for abstracts that use lettering but seems to hint that manipulation by computer is more capable of enhancing typography than the artist's hand. The image is purely decorative and undemanding. But hang this 1500mm x 1000mm print in any room and it is likely to put other art on the walls in the shade.
Who is Kim Hiorthøy ? He is a young Norwegian (born 1973) who is steeped in contemporary multi-media art. Living in Copenhagen, he is in-house designer for the Norwegian record label, Rune Grammofon. After graduating in fine art, he worked as a cinematographer's assistant in New York before launching himself as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, producing record sleeves and book jackets. He has directed music videos and short films for television.
Clearly, today's young techno-artists inhabit a visual culture that takes its inspiration from morphing, rescaling, overlaying and other special effects. It is a million miles from sploshing paint on canvas.
Less appealing, on the same site, is the photographer Toby McFarlan Pond's abstract 'Stripes', a print on satin paper, at £400 excluding VAT in an edition of 50. McFarlan Pond, who works in London and New York, did the record sleeves for Björk's CD singles 'Hyperballad' and 'Bachelorette' and has photographed for advertising campaigns by Prada, Hermes, Cartier and Audi.
'Stripes', like all his work, experiments with colour and form. It looks like Bridget Riley on a bad day. If the lights are kept low, it might succeed as wallpaper. It is the sort of pretentious banality that comes of playing around with the technology, hoping that what emerges will be art.
But the market for such art is huge. It is bought by the same kind of well-off young techno wizards who create it. They inhabit chromium-plated bars, are no strangers to the Atlantic Bar or Belgo on weekdays, and subscribe to Computer Arts, which claims to be Britain's biggest-selling creative magazine. Every issue contains a CD full of graphics software ('Exclusive: turn photos into 3D models').
For every digital art aficionado whose work is showcased in the magazine there are 100 envious digital nerds who are capable of buying it. Prints of Damien Hirst's dot paintings are being sold as click art at eyestorm.com. This shows how, as the origins and characteristics of the genre become better appreciated and its stigma diminishes, some rather tired gallery art can achieve legitimacy by sheltering under the click-art banner.
Hirst's dot paintings, batch-produced even before his dots reached the net (how many people know that?) are out of favour at auction. But how many homes actually have one? The signed dot prints at Eyestorm are $750 for the 480mm x 430mm 'Opium' (edition of 500) and $3,000 for the big, 1067mm x 1270mm 'Lysergic Acid Diethylamide' (edition of 300). Buy one and amaze your friends.
Eyestorm has recently collaborated with the Saatchi Gallery to launch the Saatchi Gallery Eyestorm Collection on the net. The Saatchi Collection has built a bricks-and-mortar extension to its gallery in Boundary Road, north-west London, which sells works by Saatchi artists that appear on the Eyestorm website. They include Hirst, Jenny Saville, Richard Billingham, Dexter Dalwood, Peter Davies, Martin Maloney and Gavin Turk.
It is an astute marketing leg-up for the Saatchi stable, but will the lure of maximum clicks change these artists' work?
Turk has contributed a digital inkjet on canvas, 'Fresh Window', to the website - $1,400 apiece from a signed edition of 100. The image is of four black window panes in a blue frame; bold, eyecatching, and undemanding unless you dig the references to Duchamp and Magritte.
Judge for yourself.
